Smoking

She'd just stop. That was it. How hard could it be? She had self-control. She didn’t really care that much about smoking anyway. She only started to keep her former husband company in bars. She only continued because she knew there was something alluring about a slender woman with a cigarette, and she liked being alluring. But she was too old to be alluring any longer, and besides, she didn’t go to bars any more. She rarely smoked, anyway.

Most importantly, the smoke seemed to irritate her new grandson, and she wanted to get to know him. While she feared she wouldn’t have patience with older grandchildren, she still liked babies. She had three young grandsons, and the first two had breathing issues that kept her from holding them very much. The new baby also seemed restless when she pulled him close. Having recently lost her husband she just couldn’t bear that he seemed irritated.

Hell, she didn’t like the after-smell herself. Sometimes when she came home to her house after being out for some time, she could smell stale cigarettes in the air. And she was a meticulous housekeeper. She cleaned and emptied her ashtrays as soon as she finished each cigarette. Still, the smell still lingered. She never really noticed it so much when she lived with Richard (who also smoked), but now that she was in a new house and on her own, the smell was aggravating.

So she decided to stop.

Doing so, she learned, was neither easy nor hard. “It had its moments,” she would say later.

Of course, she didn’t quit instantly. Instead, she began to quit by setting up a rule. She would only smoke in the kitchen with the window open and the oven fan going. This, at least, would keep as much of the smell out of the house and off her as she could. And since it was a cold, harsh winter, she didn’t want to keep her window open very much.

However, she could still smell the stale smoke in the air, even after having thoroughly cleaned her drapes and furniture. So she moved into the basement when she wanted a cigarette, again turning on a fan to diffuse the smoke.

While she was still a healthy and capable woman, even at age 68, going up and down a flight of stairs every time she wanted to light up and for no other reason was annoying, especially when she awoke in the night, lonely, with the craving pulling at her. She would crawl out of bed in the dark, don her heavy bathrobe, trudge through the quiet house, retrieve the cigarette pack and lighter from the kitchen drawer, stumble down the stairs into the cold basement, fumble for the fan and light switches and then light up.

One night in April, she just couldn’t do it. She had been up too late celebrating her birthday, her head ached, her legs hurt and there was a wicked draft. She simply rolled over and went back to sleep. A couple of weeks later she realized that she had stopped smoking altogether.

And that, she was fond of saying, was that.